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PREVENT CRIME 


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T he Honorable Homer Cummings 
Attorney General of the United States 


we C an 

PREVENT 

CRIME 

The American Program 
by 

SfciJUU, i«Ha- 

HOMER CUMMINGS 

Attorney General of the United States 

The four articles published in Liberty, 
complete and unabridged, in one volume. 


LIBERTY 


Macfadden Publications 
New York 


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Copyright, 1937 
by 

Macfadden Publications, Inc. 

5M—May, 1938 

Reprinted by permission copyright owners. 
Federal Prison Industries , Inc. 

Fort Leavenworth y Kansas 


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

SEP 131938 

DIVISION OF DOCUMENTS 



I N^T %0 D U C TI 0 A[. 

by 


Fulton Oursler 
Editor of Liberty 


T he four articles on crime prevention which are gathered 
together in this booklet were written for Liberty Magazine 
at my earnest entreaty, by Homer S. Cummings, Attorney 
General of the United States. 

Mr. Cummings agreed to prepare the articles in the spirit of 
public service. He was the one man in the United States best 
qualified for the tas\. Under his administration, national law 
enforcement had tak^en on a new meaning in this country. His 
tireless efforts and broad vision had brought the Bureau of Inves¬ 
tigation of the Department of Justice to a state of efficiency that 
set a standard for police worl\ throughout the world. 

But this, as Mr. Cummings well kjiew, was not enough. Early 
in his first administration as Attorney General he too\ a forward 
step that focussed national attention on the grave problem of 
crime. That was when he sent out his memorable call for the 
Attorney General's Conference on Crime. As everyone remem¬ 
bers, this Conference was opened by the President of the United 
States, and the effect of the constructive wor\ that was started 
through its various committees is only now beginning to be felt. 
Without publicity, wording quietly, various of the committees 


and agencies of the conference are carrying on the program that 
was evolved in that historic meeting. 

It was my privilege to help the Attorney General in a small 
way in planning the worl ^ of that conference, especially in rela¬ 
tion to public opinion and public support of the campaign 
against crime. No lasting results can be achieved in these efforts 
without a thorough understanding on the part of the public of 
its stake in these grave issues , and without the full cooperation 
of all decent, home-loving American citizenship. 

Medical science has eliminated one plague after another by 
getting at the source of infections and epidemics. That is the 
scientific way to approach the crime problem. That is the task 
set for the people of the United States today. Crime is an epidemic 
that can strike in any home. In this notable series of articles the 
Attorney General has brought the whole problem clearly before 
us and has shown the practical things that we can do to prevent 
crime. 

Liberty Magazine was proud to print this contribution to one 
of our country's major problems. 



New York, September, 1937 



WE CAN 



revent 


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l^T p in Connecticut where I live, is the 
lovely Colonial town of Litchfield, be¬ 
hind whose historic elms nobly stands 
one of America’s oldest law schools. 

To that venerable institution, in the 
first years of the last century, came the 
youthful John C. Calhoun from his 
home in South Carolina—on horseback, 
over the Old Post Road—to learn that 
law which enabled him to hold his own 
with Daniel Webster and the other legal 
giants of his time. 

Now, on those rare occasions when I 
can get away from my desk in the De¬ 
partment of Justice at Washington, I 
find myself riding in a modern auto¬ 
mobile over the same old highway into 
verdant valleys of the same old state, 
and I think of that South Carolina lad 
plodding along in the sun on the broad 
back of the sorrel mare from his father’s 
farm. Then, I ask myself: 

“Have we, as citizens, as human be¬ 
ings, advanced so far as we should have 
since John C. Calhoun’s day—so far, for 
example, as the science of transportation 
has advanced?” 

I would like to find a cheerful opti¬ 
mistic answer to that question; but 


when I think that it has taken us all 
these years and all these generations to 
discover that the best way to prevent 
crime is to prevent criminals I cannot 
honestly do so. 

The science of crime prevention, in 
spite of all the strides we have made is 
still in the horseback phase of its devel¬ 
opment. 

Young Jack Calhoun was nineteen 
when he took the Old Post Road to 
Litchfield town. That, as it happens, is 
the age at which the largest number of 
arrests for crime are now made—and 
yet, only recently have we realized that 
if we hope to protect ourselves against 
a plague of active murderers, we must 
catch our potential murderer before he 
murders. 

“Crime waves are made of criminals,” 
observes one writer, “and criminals are 
made of boys.” 

For thousands of years, our neighbors 
in the Pacific, the Chinese, have em¬ 
ployed physicians to keep them well 
rather than to cure them after they are 
ill. Only recently has Occidental medi¬ 
cine caught up with the ancient dictum 
that “‘An ounce of prevention is worth 


1 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


a pound of cure.” Most organizations 
charged with suppressing crime still act 
as if they never heard the adage. They 
go right on “trying to empty the bucket 
without turning off the water.” 

Any person surveying the crime prob¬ 
lem necessarily does so from a different 
vantage point than from any other per¬ 
son. My vantage point is the Department 
of Justice in Washington—the national 
Government’s law office. In that law 
office only a portion of our work has to 
do with crime. In that office are handled 
all matters dealing with the acquisition 
of land by the Federal Government for 
such purposes as Post Offices, national 
parks, and slum clearance projects. In it 
all antitrust litigation is centered. All 
tax litigation is conducted in one of the 
Divisions by a special staff of ioo attor¬ 
neys. In another Division all claims 
against the Federal Government are de¬ 
fended. In still another Division 3,000 
war risk suits are handled annually; 
while the Customs Division last year 
represented the United States in 74,961 
customs cases. And this is but a partial 
list of the functions performed by the 
Department. In other words, if crime 
were completely eradicated we would 
still have to conduct a tremendous civil 
law practice. 

But as to crime. We have three units 
in the Department dealing primarily 
with crime. The Federal Bureau of In¬ 
vestigation is the investigative unit. The 
Criminal Division, together with 500 
United States Attorneys and assistants, 
is charged with the prosecution of Fed¬ 
eral violators. The Bureau of Prisons 
has under its jurisdiction 19 Federal 
penal institutions ranging from prison 


camps to Alcatraz, in which the con¬ 
victed criminals are confined. With 
these three units we “catch, convict and 
confine” Federal violators. We have, I 
think, done that job well. As to their 
methods employed I shall have more to 
say later. 

For a long time I have been convinced 
that in our program there is a missing 
link. The “catch, convict, confine” pro¬ 
cess is not enough. It is a process which 
we must follow today because previous 
generations were not aware of its futil¬ 
ity. It is a process which coming gener¬ 
ations will fall back upon if we do not 
supply the missing link. That link is 
crime prevention. 

The floods which recently devastated 
great portions of the Ohio and Missis¬ 
sippi valleys, furnish an analogy. There 
is something futile about the last-minute 
task of erecting sandbags on a levee, 
later dynamiting the levee, setting up 
shelter stations, and performing all the 
other acts which are performed in the 
hysteria of the moment as the flood 
reaches its crest. There is something ter¬ 
ribly tragic in any scene in which a help¬ 
less humanity struggles with a disaster 
which it could have prevented, and 
which it finds too late has struck with 
death and destruction. Recently there 
has been an appreciation on the part of 
the general public of the value of pre¬ 
vention in many fields. Flood control is 
one. Fire control is another. 

In the subject that we are discussing, 
obviously the most effective type of pre¬ 
vention is that which heads off the de¬ 
velopment of criminal careers by the 
prevention of juvenile demoralization. 

For years we have proceeded on the 
theory that when a certain content of 


- 2 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


information has been jammed into the 
young, they will be able to make their 
own effective transition from school or 
college into the responsibilities of adult 
life. Unfortunately this is not true. In a 
simpler civilization, when all that was 
involved was going from the classroom, 
where multiplication tables were learned, 
to the small shop, factory or office where 
the multiplication tables were applied, 
the transition was far less difficult. Un¬ 
der modern conditions it is impossible 
for any child, upon the basis of his own 
experience even to conceive of the tre¬ 
mendous ramifications of adult life. 

Faced by the baffling circumstances in¬ 
to which he is suddenly thrust, and con¬ 
fronted—as the present generation of 
young people is confronted—by a short¬ 
age of opportunity for legitimate effort, 
the youngster of eighteen or nineteen 
drifts all too readily into crime. 

This is not a theory. 

A careful check of more than one 
quarter of a million recent arrests re¬ 
veals not only the menacing fact that 
there were more arrests at the age of 
nineteen than at any other age, but that 
a startlingly large percentage of our 
most serious crimes were committed by 
minors. 

No one will deny that this is a most 
confusing period for youth, and that its 
difficulty is immeasurably increased by 
enforced idleness. It is as true now as it 
was in the 17th Century when Isaac 
Watts said it, that “Satan finds some 
mischief still for idle hands to do.” And, 
right now, there are more hands. Esti¬ 
mates vary as to the number of idle 
young people in this country. There 
may be 4,000,000; there may be 5,000,- 
000. Anyhow, there are too many and 


the existence of this vast army of youth - 
ful idlers, most of them at the “court¬ 
ship age,” certainly complicates the 
problem of crime prevention. 

The foundations of the difficulty, 
go deeper still. Statistics reveal that one 
child out of every hundred between the 
ages of seven and seventeen comes be¬ 
fore the courts in the course of the year 
—and this in spite of the fact that only 
a small percentage of problem children 
requiring special treatment actually get 
into the court records. In one city, for 
example, out of 2,799 “truants” and 921 
other “juvenile offenders” only 134 
children were referred to the juvenile 
court. 

The inescapable fact, therefore, is that 
there is a large and threatening vol¬ 
ume of potential crime in process of 
generation below the ages chiefly af¬ 
fected by its current crisis of unemploy¬ 
ment. 

The fact that many of the specific of¬ 
fenses perpetrated by these youthful cul¬ 
prits are of a minor character does not 
lessen the seriousness of the general 
problem they present. 

“Small habits well pursued betimes 
May reach the dignity of crimes." 

Thus spoke the poet, Hannah More, 
in the last years of the 17th Century. 
Thus speak the records of the Depart¬ 
ment of Justice today. Few indeed are 
the criminals who did not begin as chil¬ 
dren in some petty way to carve out a 
career of crime. Our records show that 
back of almost every adult criminal is 
the shadowy outline of a juvenile delin¬ 
quent. 

Clearly, then, if we are to hack at the 
roots of the crime problem, we must be- 


-3 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


gin, not with the established criminal 
after he is arrested and confined, not 
with the idle youth of eighteen or nine¬ 
teen after he has drifted into crime, but 
with the boy and girl, and the conditions 
which develop them into useful or use¬ 
less citizens. 

This conclusion, although inevitable, 
is fraught with difficulties. 

Moreover, ordinary rules of legal pro¬ 
cedure just do not apply to child crim¬ 
inals. 

Experience has taught us that the 
offenses of juvenile criminals demand 
not so much punishment as diagnosis 
and treatment. The juvenile court is, to 
some extent, a response to the enlight¬ 
ened feeling that these youthful culprits, 
who are marching toward the gates of 
prison, are in the beginning merely “un¬ 
thinking, idle, wild and young,” and 
that, if we reach them early enough, we 
can divert their straying footsteps into 
the path that leads to useful citizenship 
and a happy life. 

A whole book could be written—in 
fact, several have been written—on the 
social and economic causes of the situa¬ 
tion which I have been describing. 

The concensus of opinion of all these 
experts, no matter from what angle they 
approach it, is that juvenile delinquency 
is a community rather than an indi¬ 
vidual problem. The most convincing 
thing about this conclusion is that it is 
based, in most cases, on broad surveys, 
often over a period of years, of actual 
conditions in crime producing areas. 

The first fact that strikes the new 
student of the problem is that there are 
decided variations, both in the number 
of juvenile offenders and in the number 
of adult criminals, as between different 


sections of the same community, and 
that those sections which show the 
highest rate of children’s offenses also 
show the highest rate of adult’s crimes. 

The second very illuminating fact is 
that there is an inescapable relationship 
between the differences in the rates of 
child and grown-up delinquency on the 
one hand and the differences in sectional 
backgrounds on the other. The crime 
rates near the business and industrial 
areas are high; those in the suburban 
residential districts correspondingly low. 

Of course, the residential communities 
have their crime problems. So, for that 
matter, do the small towns. It is well, 
too, to remember that we also have rural 
slums. There is small doubt, therefore, 
but that juvenile delinquents, who later 
become adult criminals, are the re¬ 
sult chiefly of neighborhood conditions 
whether they may be in the city, the 
small town or the country. The problem 
is essentially a community one. 

The situation is aggravated, but by no 
means primarily caused, by the fact that 
European immigrants, cften from spar¬ 
sely settled agricultural regions, find 
themselves quite unequal to bringing 
up their families in metropolitan condi¬ 
tions which they themselves do not 
understand. Southern negroes, ill at ease 
in strange Northern surroundings, pre¬ 
sent a similar difficulty. In fact our own 
Indians furnish a vivid illustration of 
cultural conflict. 

The children of such families, and also 
those of many of their American-bred 
neighbors who live in these deteriorated 
areas, tend to congregate in gangs in 
a natural effort to work out a life of their 
own. There is nothing inherently evil 


- 4 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


in this tendency. Not all who gang are 
gangsters. A gang, well led or well di¬ 
rected—as the Boys’ Clubs and Boy 
Scouts have proved—is often a fine in¬ 
fluence in a boy’s life. Ill led or ill influ¬ 
enced—as shown in the stage play 
“Dead End’’—the gang takes the in¬ 
evitable road to crime. 

“These delinquency areas, as the so¬ 
ciologists call them, take on a tradition 
which can only be compared with the 
tradition of a great old school. . . . The 
place is stuffed with history and ex¬ 
ample, handed down by boy to boy, 
until the housewreckers come. These 
areas have a disintegrating effect upon 
character. A child living in them too 
easily becomes demoralized, beaten and 
hopeless.” 

The loss of employment or unde¬ 
pendability of the father of a family or 
any other mischance which induces real 
poverty is, of course, another cause of 
juvenile crime. “With every chance of 
moral recovery in his favor,” wrote a 
French observer of the slums of Paris, 
“the child who is underfed and desti¬ 
tute of the most meagre comfort is in¬ 
capable, through his physical depression, 
of struggling successfully against temp¬ 
tation. Feed him, give him a decent 
home and you will win him over from 
the quicksands of vice to the bed rock of 
good citizenship.” 

But it is idle to speculate here on 
causes, except as such speculation may 
assist us to remove those causes, or, if 
they are not removable, understand 
them and take appropriate steps to 
counteract them. 

One obvious reason why the present 
situation is especially critical is the 
changed position of the church in com¬ 


munity life. A hundred years ago, most 
children attended Sunday School regu¬ 
larly—although perhaps under protest! 
—and were there taught principles of 
moral and spiritual conduct which were 
more or less common to all denomina¬ 
tions or sects. Their elders—perhaps be- 
bause of the absence of golf courses, 
automobiles and commercialized forms 
of amusement—attended church ser¬ 
vice, at least on Sunday, and many of 
them regularly on prayer-meeting and 
other nights. 

Nowadays, many of the children 
never see the inside of the Sunday 
School room. Many of their parents 
never attend the church or participate 
in its work in any manner. To a large 
extent, therefore, the church has lost 
the influential place it once held as an 
instrument of crime prevention. 

JVTeanwhile, theschool, which is pres¬ 
ent-day society’s only point of collective 
contact with children of all sorts, has 
steadily advanced in its strictly peda¬ 
gogic activities. It teaches more, and it 
teaches more expertly, than it did in our 
day and our parents’ day. But we are 
still far behind in our efforts to relate 
the curriculum to present social com¬ 
plexities—to the very concrete problems 
of every-day life. The school must fur¬ 
nish an education in “living” to all 
children and it must furnish individu¬ 
alization of treatment to each. What 
curriculum does the unadjusted, handi¬ 
capped youngster get that the normal 
average child doesn’t get? These are 
some of our objectives and some of our 
problems. 

As for relating the child’s activities 
at school with those in the home, we 


- 5 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


have all been blandly obtuse as to our 
duties and opportunities. It would seem 
to be self-evident, as one worker with 
youngsters puts it, that “by its failure 
to tie up the boy’s school life with his 
home and recreational life, society makes 
about the same progress that one would, 
if, in trying to push a wagon up a hill, 
one gave a short shove and then sat 
down to rest, allowing the wagon to 
coast back to its starting place.” 

Another important factor is the failure 
of parents to understand the child and 
parental ignorance of methods of child 
training and character development. 

This would seem to be a mild state¬ 
ment of a very serious situation. 

Many parents have apparently not 
only lost their ability to understand and 
control their children, but fail utterly 
to understand and appraise the diffi¬ 
culties which their children must meet. 
This is especially, and perhaps excusa¬ 
bly, true of foreign-born parents with 
American-born children. Our foreign- 
born citizens, although not immune to 
criminal tendencies, contribute no more 
than their numerical share to the vol¬ 
ume of American crime. Their children, 
however, are apparently the victims of a 
loosening of the old control and a too 
quick assimilation of the new freedom. 

Whatever the cause may be, the failure 
of both foreign-born and native-born 
parents to exert a proper influence over 
their offspring, is perhaps the chief 
motivating factor in the production of 
juvenile crime. Moreover, there seems 
to be little hope of an immediate change 
in this situation, since workers with 
children report that close to 75% of the 
problem children they are called upon 


to treat have parents who are problems 
themselves. 

Fortunately, there is more encourage¬ 
ment to be had from a study of the de¬ 
linquent children themselves than from 
any of the factors which might nor¬ 
mally have been expected to keep them 
from delinquency. 

Superficial observers of the child prob¬ 
lem talk as if the present-day child was 
different mentally, morally and physi¬ 
cally from his parents at the same age, 
as if there had occurred some species of 
generation in childhood itself. I do not 
believe that is so. Boys will be boys— 
always; and girls, girls. It is society that 
produces problem children, not the chil¬ 
dren themselves. 

The child’s chief desire is to have fun. 
It is society’s job to see that he gets it, 
at the right time and of the right sort. 
If the child rebels because he doesn’t get 
it, it is society’s fault, not his. 

This is the only simple part of the 
whole complicated problem. Children’s 
wishes are themselves so simple that it 
is comparatively easy to satisfy them. 
Most first thefts are to obtain the luxury 
of a picture show or a ball game or a 
bag of candy. Of course, it is not so 
easy when the parents of the children 
are poor; but that is where the welfare 
worker and the Government relief 
agency come in. 

Sometimes these normal wishes reach 
abnormal proportions through some 
undiscovered lack in physical makeup. 

A judge in Indianapolis observed the 
case of an otherwise well behaved four- 
teen-year-old boy who repeatedly stole 
small sums to spend on candy. He recog¬ 
nized and apparently repented his error, 
but could not resist the temptation to 


- 6 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


do whatever was necessary to satisfy this 
one craving. Laboratory experiments 
established a definite lack of sugar in 
this boy’s physical composition. Once 
this lack was remedied, the boy straight¬ 
ened out, got a job at $13 a week, and 
is paying back what he stole at the rate 
of $ a week. 

Whatever the cause of a child’s mis¬ 
behavior, it is obvious, as one penologist 
has well expressed it, that “when we 
learn to look forward with the child 
instead of backward with the adult 
criminal, we will have made great 
strides in the prevention of crime.” 

At the turn of the century, the effort 
to “look forward with the child” took 
definite form with the establishment of 
the first juvenile courts in Chicago and 
Denver. These tribunals were not origi¬ 
nated with the primary object of pre¬ 
venting delinquency. They were estab¬ 
lished, as one leader in this movement 
has pointed out, “because socially-mind¬ 
ed people became convinced that throw¬ 
ing children into jails with hardened 
adult criminals, sex perverts, and pros¬ 
titutes was poor social work. They came 
out of jail worse than when they en¬ 
tered.” 

Nevertheless, the plan, whereby a 
sympathetic judge heard the child’s 
case informally, consulted with the 
child’s parents, neighborhood welfare 
workers and officers of the law, then 
tried to work out some practical method 
of improving the child’s environment 
or removing him from it, seemed to 
have so many possibilities for good that 
crime preventionists had high hopes of 
it. 

When Boston, Milwaukee and other 
progressive cities followed, and the 


movement took on a nation-wide char¬ 
acter, these hopes were strengthened; 
and when first one juvenile court and 
then another added the services of a 
clinic affording facilities for the psychi¬ 
atric study of youngsters who failed to 
respond to the ordinary ministrations 
of the court, many optimists felt that 
at last the crime prevention compass had 
been boxed. 

For thirty years thereafter, these op¬ 
timists sat back and rested on the 
cushion of juvenile court omnipotence. 
Then, suddenly, came a bombshell that 
blew the whole structure of crime pre¬ 
vention optimism into the pessimism 
of outer darkness. 

While the optimist slept, the scientist 
had worked. Harvard University had 
set in motion a survey “to gain under¬ 
standing of the individuals who commit 
crime, what they are, whence they 
spring, and the forces that move them.” 

As a first step in this inquiry, a study 
was made of a thousand cases of delin¬ 
quents sent by the Boston Juvenile Court 
for examination to its clinical adjunct, 
the Judge Baker Foundation. This study 
was entrusted to Professor Sheldon 
Glueck of the Harvard Law School in 
collaboration with Dr. Eleanor T. 
Glueck. 

Now the Gluecks were friendly to 
the idea of a juvenile court. Their re¬ 
lations with Judge Frederick P. Cabot, 
renowned judge of the Boston court, 
were close and cooperative. The latter as 
a matter of fact, was one of the financial 
sponsors of the survey. Care was taken 
to select typical, not extreme cases, and 
only those cases which had been on the 
record books for five years, so that there 


- 7 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


might be an absolutely fair test of how 
many of the youthful offenders were 
what the criminologists call “recidivists" 
and you and I would call “backsliders.” 

The Boston Juvenile Court, as an em¬ 
bodiment of the principle on which the 
juvenile court was founded and as a 
force for good in the general life of the 
community emerged from this inquiry 
with flying colors, but, as an instrument 
of crime prevention—well, let’s use the 
language of the report: 

“What was the conduct of our boys 
in the five-year post-treatment period? 
Eighty-eight -percent of them continued 
their delinquencies during this period. 
Those apprehended were arrested on 
the average of 3.6 times each. Nor were 
the arrests of our youths essentially for 
petty offenses; two thirds of the entire 
group of 905 boys whose post-treat- 
ment conduct was determinable com¬ 
mitted serious offenses, largely felonies. 

“The major conclusion is inescapable, 
then, that, the treatment carried out by 
Clinic , Court , and associated community 
facilities had very little effect in pre¬ 
venting recidivism .” 

Yes, that was the immediate major 
conclusion. The ultimate major conclu¬ 
sion, which shook the whole world of 
crime prevention to its foundations, was 
that we still had not gone down far 
enough in our digging for the roots of 
crime. 

We should have known that without 
waiting for a professor to tell us. In fact 
at the Department of Justice, we knew 
that seventy percent of the boys who get 
into training schools and reformatories 
had previously rebelled against conven¬ 
tional educational methods, become tru¬ 


ants and drifted about from one mar¬ 
ginal occupation to another. Clearly this 
means that we do not recognize such 
cases at an early enough age and bring 
to bear upon enough of them character¬ 
building influences, the technique of the 
psychiatrist and the social worker. 

In short, to wait until a child has 
committed an offense of sufficient mag¬ 
nitude to justify his appearance in a 
juvenile court is to wait too long. 

All of which is no reflection on the 
juvenile court as a proper tribunal for 
the trial of cases involving youthful 
offenders against the law. It simply 
means that the primary function of the 
court is, as its founders intended, to 
keep children from being thrown into 
jails with hardened adult criminals. In 
other words, it provides an excellent 
method of dealing with delinquency 
after its occurrence. 

What we must do, however, if we wish 
to prevent delinquency and thus to pre¬ 
vent crime, is to go out and find the 
probable—even the possible—delin¬ 
quent child before he becomes delin¬ 
quent, and to do whatever is necessary 
to keep him from getting that way. 

This is obviously a much larger order 
than the detection and prosecution of 
crime or the confinement and parole of 
criminals, because it must enlist the ser¬ 
vices of the home, the school, the 
church, the character-building organi¬ 
zation, the court, the police, the entire 
community. 

It will require calm, dispassionate, 
thoughtful effort, and much the same 
sort of patience and sacrifice which 
characterized the fight on yellow fever 
and malaria. In the end, however, it 
will be equally successful. 


- 8 - 


(patching Crooks 

IS NOT ENOUGH 


II 

Crime prevention is an ear-filling 
phrase which has almost as many mean¬ 
ings as the word “gentleman.” 

To the hard-headed police officer, 
grappling at close quarters with “the 
law in action,” crime prevention is 
catching the criminal and putting him 
in jail. To the worried jailer, it is keep¬ 
ing him there. 

To the social student, underneath all 
his confusing talk of etiology and idea¬ 
tion, groupists and recidivists, inhibit¬ 
ing neuroses and familial configurations 
—confusing, I might say, not only to 
the average layman but to at least one 
Attorney General!—crime prevention is 
catching the would-be or might-be crim¬ 
inal before he commits his crime, and 
diverting him through expert guidance 
into the paths of virtue. 

To me, as chief law enforcement offi¬ 
cer of our Federal Government, crime 
prevention is all of these things in one. 

Together they could and should con¬ 
stitute what one person has termed “a 
streamline attack on streamlined crime.” 
That they have not done so is the great¬ 


est reflection I know on the alleged 
modernity of our times. 

There have been references in recent 
years and from high places to horse-and- 
buggy days. There has also been the 
suggestion that we are perhaps too in¬ 
clined to cling to the outmoded prac¬ 
tices of those ancient times. 

As you know, I am not one to differ 
with that suggestion, except to remark 
that, since saddles were made before 
buggies, it might be just as accurate to 
compare our lagging practices in some 
important respects to the horseback pace 
of the early 1800’s. 

In the vital matter of crime preven¬ 
tion, we are not only still in the horse¬ 
back era, but we still adhere to the fusty 
practice of locking the barn door after 
the crime has been committed. 

In 1933, when the present Attorney 
General was first brought face to face 
with this appalling fact, the demand 
for crime prevention reached an all- 
time high. A nation, hitherto callous to 
crime, was horror-struck by the fate of 
the Lindbergh baby. The publicity 


9 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


which followed spotlighted the whole 
criminal situation. 

Every twenty seconds, hour after 
hour, day after day, a crime of desperate 
proportions—robbery, assault, burg¬ 
lary, rape, kidnapping, man-slaughter, 
murder—was being committed within 
the boundaries of the United States. 

Over a twelve-month period, the al¬ 
most unbelievable total of nearly 1,500,- 
000 such major crimes were committed 
—a crime against one out of every 
eighty-four American citizens, affecting 
one out of every sixteen American 
homes. 

Twelve thousand of our citizens were 
murdered. That was at the rate of 
thirty-three a day. Fifty thousand were 
robbed. A hundred thousand were as¬ 
saulted. And the menace was growing 
every day. 

There were probably twice as many 
people in the underworld carrying dead¬ 
ly weapons as there were in both the 
Army and the Navy—a whole half mil¬ 
lion of armed thugs, murderers, thieves, 
firebugs, burglars and hold-up men— 
and the havoc this standing army of 
criminals wrought was costing the peo¬ 
ple of the United States, under some 
estimates, at least, as much as eighteen 
billion dollars a year. For every cent 
American taxpayers spent for education 
they paid five, six or seven cents toward 
the crime bill. 

To be sure, “crime waves” in the 
United States were no new phenome¬ 
non; and it was no new thing for an At¬ 
torney General to be appalled by them. 
Edmund Randolph, first of the line, 
wrote despairingly to James Madison of 
an escaped convict who was devastating 
the Virginia country-side: “Nay, I do 


not believe that government can by any 
means in its power effect the seizure of 
this man.” Over a hundred years later, 
in 1889, Attorney General Miller con¬ 
fessed that in some districts the lives 
of the State’s witnesses were in such 
danger that it would be “simply in¬ 
human” to ask them to testify. 

But these previous outbursts were spo¬ 
radic in time and local in scope. The 
wave that was sweeping the nation in 
1932 and 1933 was marked by its vio¬ 
lence, the brazen methods of the perpe¬ 
trators and the fact that the crimes were 
methodically planned and ruthlessly ex¬ 
ecuted by organized gangs. 

It was natural, therefore, that the law 
enforcement officials of the early Thir¬ 
ties should feel even more discouraged 
than Edmund Randolph and William 
Miller had felt before them; but there 
was not the same excuse for giving in to 
their discouragement. 

After all, the world had progressed 
since Randolph’s time, even since Mil¬ 
ler’s. Crime had progressed devasta- 
tingly. Its dastardly record showed that. 
Shouldn’t crime prevention also have 
progressed? And if it hadn’t, shouldn’t 
it? 

I think you all know the answer the 
Department of Justice gave to that last 
question. I think you will agree, too, that 
in the detection and prosecution of out¬ 
standing criminals, the Department has 
made commendable progress. And yet 
we have no more than scratched the sur¬ 
face of the body of crime. 

“It is no easy task,” as one of my pre¬ 
decessors in office has observed, “to abol¬ 
ish ignorance, poverty, vice and crime.” 
And until but recently it has been gener¬ 
ally assumed that it was not for the 


- 10 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


Department of Justice to concern itself 
with this larger problem. Our tradi¬ 
tional function might be described in 
the phrase “Catch them, convict them 
and confine them” and we have tried to 
obey this orthodox mandate. 

But even in this narrow field any im¬ 
provements we might initiate could only 
begin to solve the problem. For approxi¬ 
mately ninety per cent of all offenses 
committed in this country are not with¬ 
in the jurisdiction of the Federal Gov¬ 
ernment. Assaults, robberies, burglaries, 
murders, kidnappings are beyond the 
Federal pale unless perchance a Federal 
officer is assaulted, a post office is burg¬ 
larized, a person is killed on a Federal 
reservation, the kidnapped victim is 
transported in interstate commerce or 
some other and usually narrow basis of 
Federal jurisdiction is present. Of the 
thousands of prosecuting officers in this 
country only 500 are Federal prosecu¬ 
tors. Compare also the small list of 19 
penal institutions operated by the Fed¬ 
eral government with the large list of 
state penitentiaries, city jails, and over 
3000 county jails operated by states and 
their subdivisions. We can operate only 
within our proper sphere, and that 
sphere is determined for the most part 
by our constitutional pattern which di¬ 
vides powers and duties between the 
states and Federal government. 

Our first task was to apprehend 
and convict and to do it swiftly, effi¬ 
ciently. 

There had been changes for the worse 
in the crime situation. In 1932, the word 
“gangster” was on everybody’s lips. 
Now, it is “racketeer.” The transition 
is illuminating. 

There have always been gangsters. In 


the Old World, they were called feudal 
lords and robber barons. As that 18th 
Century philosopher with the strange 
name, Beilby Porteus, phrased it, 
“Princes were privileged to kill, and 
numbers sanctified the crime.” 

In the New World, the gangster be¬ 
gan more humbly. Back in the horse¬ 
back days of the early 18oo’s, gangs had 
already developed in a background of 
slums, crowded tenements, poverty and 
vice. Into such conditions were crowded 
thousands of newly arrived and un¬ 
tutored immigrants. Originally the rival 
gangs were content to fight each other, 
but such unprofitable activities soon 
gave way to crime as a business. 

Recognizing his power and profiting 
by his experience, the gangster began a 
“reaching out” process, seeking more 
sources of income and new methods of 
obtaining profit. He enlisted with both 
employer and employee in the labor 
warfare and took his toll from both 
sides. It was but a step further until ex¬ 
tortion, intimidation and unrestrained 
force were extended to trades and busi¬ 
ness enterprises. 

The gangster was now a racketeer. 

Racketeering was not a novel type of 
human activity, either. The present day 
racketeer had his counterpart in charac¬ 
ters of fact and fiction, including ma¬ 
rauding potentates, who preyed on the 
caravans of desert merchants, and the 
barons of the Rhine and the Danube, 
who sold protection to merchants who 
transported their wares by boat. 

Although the racketeer is a much 
more dangerous criminal than the gang¬ 
ster, and although his depredations, 
through merchants of every description 


-11 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


affect the pockets of all of us—as distin¬ 
guished from the loss sustained by the 
individual who happened to get in the 
path of the gangster—the racketeer does 
not begin to cast the shadow across the 
general public’s mental path that the 
gangster cast. 

There are a variety of reasons for this. 
One of them is that in these racketeering 
days, the man who plans the crime, and 
causes it to be committed, and is the 
real criminal, is not the man who col¬ 
lects the tribute or does the brutal kill¬ 
ing. There is less drama to this new 
type of professional bad men; and for 
that reason he appeals less to the public 
imagination. 

This fact has its compensation. There 
is less temptation to the playwright and 
the scenarist than there was in the earl¬ 
ier phase of gangster crime to indulge 
in harmful glorification. But, from the 
standpoint of successful prosecution, the 
secret methods of the racketeer, often 
hidden from the officers of the law by 
the very victim whom he fleeces, present 
new problems which must be solved by 
new methods. 

It is, of course, elementary that in any 
advanced society there must be two 
parallel programs to cope with delin¬ 
quency and crime, one the immediate 
program; the other, the long-time one. 

The immediate program is the one 
with which we are all familiar. A bank 
is robbed; a child is kidnapped; a citizen 
murdered. Immediate action is im¬ 
perative. The thief must be caught; the 
kidnapper apprehended; the murderer 
prevented from killing others. And 
since, in 1933, we were face to face, 
every twenty seconds, with this des¬ 


perate type of criminal “with all his 
crimes,” as Shakespeare has it, “broad 
blown, as flush as May,” it was our in¬ 
escapable duty to grapple with the im¬ 
mediate program first. 

The public demand that we throw 
away such Federal policing methods as 
we had already developed and sub¬ 
stitute for them something else, any¬ 
thing else , was daily growing stronger. 

“The Lindbergh kidnapping would 
never have happened in England!” 
shouted one group. 

“Give us Scotland Yard!” cried 
another. 

There were, of course, excellent rea¬ 
sons why the Lindbergh kidnapping 
could not happen in England, and 
could here. Chief among them was that 
Great Britain was an Island: there 
would be no place remote for the kid¬ 
napper to escape to, no remote place for 
him to hide his victim. 

Nevertheless, the Scotland Yard idea 
found strong proponents. Commis¬ 
sioners, Inspectors and Superintendents 
of that excellent London police force 
have thrilled us for generations as they 
stalked through the pages of English 
fiction: Charles Dickens’ “Inspector 
Bucket,” Wilkie Collins’ “Sergeant 
Cuff,” Conan Doyle’s “Lestrade,” so 
often saved from failure by the Wizard 
of Baker Street. Few of us have realized 
that Scotland Yard is not primarily a 
detective force, and is not a national 
law enforcement organization, but is 
simply a romantic name for the Metro¬ 
politan Police Department of the City 
of London, one out of a hundred and 
eighty-seven police forces in England 
and Wales. 

True, the Yard’s Criminal Record 


- 12 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


Office acts as a clearing house of Identi¬ 
fication data for the British Isles, in 
much the same way as the Identification 
Unit of the Department of Justice 
serves the law enforcement agencies of 
this country; but it is significant, as re¬ 
flecting the difference in scope of the 
two units, that Scotland Yard, when I 
last visited it, had a collection of about 
500,000 fingerprint records, while the 
Identification Unit of the Department 
of Justice has over 6,000,000, and is in¬ 
creasing this quota at the amazing rate 
of 3,700 a day. 

But even if it were assumed that Scot¬ 
land Yard operated over the total area 
of Great Britain, its problem could not 
be compared to the conditions which 
exist in the United States. 

Take the Urschell kidnapping case, for 
example. Mr. Urschell was kidnapped 
in Oklahoma; he was carried into a re¬ 
mote section of Texas; the demand for 
ransom money came from Missouri, and 
there was already prepared a gang of 
confederates in Minnesota to make dis¬ 
position of the ransom money. 

There were other groups in 3 differ¬ 
ent additional States and our represen¬ 
tatives had to travel in 16 states in 
rounding up those criminals. But calcu¬ 
lating only the 7 original states; exclusive 
of the additional states in which our rep¬ 
resentatives traveled, those 7 states have 
an area of about 683,000 square miles, 
and that 683,000 square miles super¬ 
imposed upon the map of Europe 
would cover Germany, France, Italy, 
Austria, Denmark, Holland, Switzer¬ 
land, England, Scotland and Wales. 

The Urschell case was by no means 
exceptional from a geographical stand¬ 


point. In another recent kidnapping 
case, the operations of the criminals took 
place in seven states; and it was neces¬ 
sary for the agents of the Department 
of Justice to go into nine additional 
states in their successful efforts to solve 
the crime and bring its perpetrators to 
justice. 

My visit to the famous Surete Na¬ 
tional in Paris in search of light on our 
own policing problem was equally dis¬ 
couraging. One could not fail to be im¬ 
pressed by the alertness of its repre¬ 
sentatives and the infinitely painstaking 
methods in vogue. For France, although 
somewhat larger in territory than its 
British neighbor, is one of the most diffi¬ 
cult countries in the world in which to 
become lost. Its wide flung method of 
personal check, its cards of identity, its 
registration through hotels, lodging 
houses, and “the concierge system” are 
of great assistance in police work, 
though hardly adaptable to our own in¬ 
stitutions. 

A study of the Belgian situation 
yielded similar results. 

The conclusion was obvious: Euro¬ 
pean countries—relatively small in ter¬ 
ritorial extent, homogeneous in popu¬ 
lation, without conflicting sovereignties 
and jurisdictions—had a problem far 
less complex and difficult than our own. 
Manifestly we had not met our crime 
problem as well as they had theirs. Un¬ 
doubtedly there were many lessons we 
could learn from their experiences and 
methods. Our job, however, was the de¬ 
velopment of a system suitable to our 
own peculiar needs, and for this there 
was no precedent. 

So, balked in our efforts to find a 


- 13 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


ready-made solution to our problems, 
we turned back to the forces we already 
had at our command, and concentrated 
on the job of making them more effec¬ 
tive. That job, we soon found out, was 
not so much a change of method as a 
release of energy. 

Federal law enforcement agencies were 
active, efficient and alert to modern 
needs; but they were so hampered by 
restrictions on their operations that they 
were well nigh helpless in their battle 
with nation-wide crime. 

At the time of the adoption of the 
Constitution of the United States, there 
was little need that the Federal Govern¬ 
ment should concern itself with such a 
problem. 

Due to the isolation of the different 
settlements, the operations of criminals 
were, of necessity, local in their nature. 

You will recall that when John 
Adams first went from Boston to Phila¬ 
delphia, his wife, the famous and de¬ 
lightful Abigail Adams, made note of 
the fact that it took five weeks to re¬ 
ceive a return letter from that “far 
country.” 

Now, goods and people move as 
quickly from San Francisco to New 
York as they once moved from Philadel¬ 
phia to the National Capitol. From Chi¬ 
cago to Washington is no more distant 
in time today than from Concord to 
Boston, by foot or horse, one hundred 
years ago. Crime, like everything else, 
has felt the effect of this “speeding up.” 
It is no longer a menace of purely 
municipal, county or state limitations. 
Like prairie fires, starting from a tiny 
blaze and raging with the first sweep 
of the wind into instruments of major 


disaster, crime of today may begin with 
a petty infraction, and within seemingly 
insignificant space of time, encompass 
every form of outlawry. 

To meet these new conditions, State 
and local authorities were, in the nature 
of things, virtually helpless. Even with¬ 
in the same state, there is still complete 
independence as between county and 
county; and if there be partial coopera¬ 
tion it is on a treaty basis which exists 
or not, according to the personal ac¬ 
quaintances and friendships of the dif¬ 
ferent officials. If they wish to cooper¬ 
ate, they do; if they do not wish to do 
so, they do not; and if they happen to 
be jealous or fearful of each other, there 
may be not only failure to coperate, but 
the actual placing of obstacles in the 
way of successful prosecution. In any 
event, they are hamstrung in any battle 
with inter-sectional offenders. The 
state has never been a unit of law en¬ 
forcement. The county? Yes. But not 
the State. 

The more deeply we went into this 
problem, the more obvious it became 
that our first and perhaps our chief 
trouble was that much crime was or¬ 
ganized on a national basis, and we 
were not. It was clear, too, that no state 
or local organization, whether modeled 
on the vigilance committees of the old 
West or on the metropolitan police de¬ 
partment of a modern city, could expect 
to cope with our far-flung problems. 

In short, what we needed to catch our 
interstate criminals was a further de¬ 
velopment of what we already had in 
the Federal Bureau of Investigaion of 
the Department of Justice under the able 
and vigorous directorship of J. Edgar 


- 14 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


Hoover. But we needed modern sci¬ 
entific equipment. The special agents 
needed automobiles, fire-arms and pro¬ 
tective devices. It became apparent that 
training and retaining of the men was a 
subject for special emphasis. New field 
offices would have to be opened, more 
agents secured. All these things and 
more were necessary and we secured 
them. It was not long before the Bu¬ 
reau of Investigation became the best 
equipped law enforcement unit in the 
world. We needed also laws to free us 
from the shackles that had been placed 
upon us during the horseback era. 

This being clear, we went to Con¬ 
gress with recommendations for twenty- 
one bills designed to put teeth into our 
existing machinery of law enforcement. 
These suggestions a thoroughly coopera¬ 
tive Congress promptly approved and 
enacted into law. 

Freed from shackles by this new leg¬ 
islation the investigators and prosecu¬ 
tors of the Department have made a 
record which the world has acclaimed. 

The stories of our activities in certain 
famous kidnapping and gangster cases 
have been told much more dramatically 
by the gentlemen and ladies of the 
press than I could—or would!—tell 
them. 

At any rate, in California, in Massa¬ 
chusetts, in New Jersey, in Missouri, in 
Kentucky, in Illinois, in Texas, in all 
the states, disturbed firesides of law- 
abiding American citizens were prompt¬ 
ly comforted as a result of the combined 
activities of local officers and repre¬ 
sentatives of the Department of Justice 
in detecting attempts to extort money 
under threat of injury or kidnapping, 


and in punishing promptly other crimes. 
In all of these cases—and the hundreds 
that have followed them—effective 
results were speedily accomplished 
through friendly cooperation with local 
law enforcement organizations. 

Jealousy between Municipal and State 
and Federal law enforcement bodies, 
which has long been an obstacle to effec¬ 
tive crime prevention in this country is 
fast disappearing. 

One of the most outstanding illustra¬ 
tions of cooperation is found in the 
system whereby the Department’s col¬ 
lection of over 6,000,000 fingerprints is 
available to the State and Municipal 
police departments who have assisted in 
supplying this unprecedented collec¬ 
tion. This cooperative venture results in 
the identification of approximately 
1,000 arrested persons every day. 

The Statistical Section receives re¬ 
ports of crime conditions from the police 
departments of more than 1,600 cities, 
and, after compiling these records, fur¬ 
nishes them to police departments, 
thereby enabling them to study crime 
trends and fluctuations. 

A technical laboratory is maintained 
by the Department at Washington. This 
laboratory not only permits an analysis 
of possible evidence, but it likewise 
affords an excellent school for the study 
of the use of the latest scientific equip¬ 
ment. 

It is appropriate while speaking of 
cooperation to state that Mr. Fulton 
Oursler, editor of Liberty, was one of 
the most enthusiastic participants in the 
Conference on Crime in 1934 and 
through Liberty Magazine and the re¬ 
lated publications a real contribution 


- 15 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


has been made to the thinking on the 
crime problem. 

It is one thing to catch a criminal. It 
is still another to convict him. The latter 
task is committed to the prosecuting 
arm of the Department and centers in 
the Criminal Division. Here a staff of 
35 attorneys supervise prosecutions in 
the Federal courts. This is the clearing 
house for Federal prosecutors. Here 
special trial men are available for ser¬ 
vice in the field. Here all correspon¬ 
dence with United States Attorneys in 
criminal cases is carried on. Here briefs 
in criminal cases in the Supreme Court 
and other courts are prepared. 

In the field there are over 500 United 
States Attorneys and their assistants, 
located at strategic points in the 95 
Federal districts. Federal prosecutors 
are stationed in every district in the 
United States, and in Hawaii, the Canal 
Zone, the Virgin Islands and in far-off 
Shanghai, where, under extra-territorial 
arrangements the United States Court 
for China passes judgment upon the 
United States citizens who violate laws 
enacted by Congress back in Washing¬ 
ton. These prosecutors constitute a far- 


flung branch of our crime control pro¬ 
gram. 

While 60 attorneys compose the staff 
of the United States Attorney of New 
York City, one lone assistant holds forth 
at Corpus Christi, Texas. Much of the 
work of these attorneys is civil in char¬ 
acter, but the major share is taken up 
with criminal cases. These cases are in¬ 
vestigated by over a dozen separate in¬ 
vestigative units, including the Federal 
Bureau of Investigation, The Post Office 
Inspectors, the Secret Service, the Nar¬ 
cotic Unit, and the Intelligence Unit of 
the Treasury Department. I am proud 
of the record made by these prosecutors. 
During the first half of the past year 
convictions were secured in 94.4% of 
all criminal cases brought in the Federal 
courts. 

Yes, the Department of Justice has 
made progress in the important and im¬ 
mediate task of arresting and convicting 
federal violators. Gangsters and racke¬ 
teers and even ordinary offenders hesi¬ 
tate longer before committing a punish¬ 
able offense. A beginning has also been 
made in the fight for really effective 
prison and parole system, but more as 
to that later. 


- 16 - 


The Scandal 

OF OUR JAILS 

hi 


M ost of us, who try to live in such a 
manner that we won’t go to jail, know 
little about what jails are like, and less 
about what they are for. If we think 
about them at all, we associate them ex¬ 
clusively with crime punishment. We 
never think of them either as instru¬ 
ments to crime prevention or as ob¬ 
stacles to that goal. 

The Federal Prison System is now the 
largest single correctional system in the 
World. In the twenty-two Federal penal 
institutions there are now almost 17,000 
prisoners. In addition, we have about 
5,000 Federal prisoners in state and 
local institutions and approximately 
another 1,000 persons in the United 
States narcotic farms, which come under 
the jurisdiction of the United States Pub¬ 
lic Health Service. I note from the 
weekly statistical report on my desk 
that there are also about 25,000 men 
and women under probation supervi¬ 
sion and approximately 5,000 former 
inmates of our Federal institutions un¬ 
der parole supervision. In all, there is 
today an army of 52,000 prisoners, for¬ 
mer prisoners, and probationers under 
the control of the Department of Jus¬ 


tice. This group consists of a relatively 
small number of “big shot” racketeers, 
gun-men, kidnappers, and fraudsters 
as well as a large heterogeneous array 
of “small-time” moonshiners, automo¬ 
bile thieves, drug peddlers, counter¬ 
feiters, and forgers. 

The administrative job of guarding, 
feeding, employing, educating, and su¬ 
pervising so vast an army is a stagger¬ 
ing one. Almost twenty-five per cent 
of all the funds expended by the Depart¬ 
ment of Justice goes to this work. To de¬ 
scribe how we classify or sort out these 
men into homogeneous groups, analyze 
their problems, employ them, and pro¬ 
vide them with the individual treatment 
necessary to redirect their criminal ten¬ 
dencies would take a volume. Just con¬ 
sider, for example, the difficulties con¬ 
nected with providing these men with 
useful and stimulating employment in 
such manner as will not interfere with 
private industry and the free citizens. 
This problem has troubled Attorneys 
General ever since the Department of 
Justice was established. No one condones 
idleness in prison. Every taxpayer in¬ 
sists that the prisoners ought to earn 


- 17 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


their living by the sweat of their brows, 
but how to work out the practical ques¬ 
tions connected with this problem per¬ 
plexes the imagination and ingenuity 
of all of us. This and a hundred other 
problems comprise the science of pe¬ 
nology which deserves more detailed 
treatment than can be given here. 

Under the able direction of the former 
Director of the Bureau of Prisons, Mr. 
Sanford Bates, and his successor, Mr. 
James V. Bennett, great progress has 
been made recently. The Federal Gov¬ 
ernment during the last few years has 
completely reorganized its prison sys¬ 
tem and has provided facilities geared 
to handling scientifically the men and 
women who are committed there by 
our courts. Perhaps the worst blot on 
the American penal picture is the county 
jail. And yet the average citizen knows 
nothing about this institution in his 
midst. 

In the United States there are over 
3,000 county jails, each one operating 
independently and for the most part 
under the jurisdiction of officials elected 
without consideration as to their qualifi¬ 
cations or experience in prison work. 
In many instances these officials have 
numerous other remunerative interests 
and responsibilities and give little of 
their time to the management and con¬ 
trol of the jail. They have no qualms 
about delegating authority to the low¬ 
est bidder in the community, who acts 
more or less as a janitor, with the result 
that the actual management of the jail 
is left to the prisoners. In fact, Federal 
inspectors have been met at the doors 
of some jails by prisoners who had the 
keys, and apparently full control. 

A typical example of a sheriff’s prac¬ 


tice of forgetting the jail for more per¬ 
sonal interests is clearly shown in the 
following epistle to the Federal Bureau 
of Prisons which came in reply to letters 
calling his attention to the necessity for 
correcting conditions in the county jail: 

“My failure to reply to these letters 
is due to the fact, as you know, that 
this State during the months from Sep¬ 
tember to April was involved in a cam¬ 
paign. For your information I was also 
in that campaign, which campaign I 
started the latter part of September and 
did not finish until about the 3rd of 
April. We were reelected by a very 
handsome majority. I am out of the 
campaign now and can give those mat¬ 
ters my personal attention.” 

What do you suppose happened to the 
prisoners in this jail during the seven 
months from September to April? 

On my desk as I write, is a report 
showing that in other jails favored pris¬ 
oners have been allowed to leave and go 
to the race track, attend county fairs, 
and in at least one instance to attend 
one of the games of the World Series. 
In another case prisoners were allowed 
to leave a jail and to work at a gasoline 
station and on a farm owned and oper¬ 
ated by the jailer. At this same jail 
women were taken out and permitted 
to work in a tea room owned and oper¬ 
ated by this same official, on a public 
highway. 

Liquor and drugs have been traf¬ 
ficked into jails and drunken parties 
permitted. When a minister was greet¬ 
ing the prisoners after a religious ser¬ 
vice in one, of the jails, he suddenly 
drew away as if he had received a great 
shock. The room was filled with a 


- 18 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


strong odor of alcohol. Apparently sev¬ 
eral of the prisoners had been imbibing 
freely during the services: and one still 
had some of the evidence in the form of 
a pint bottle, visible in his rear pocket. 

There was such poor discipline in 
one jail, as well as lack of control, that 
a prisoner left the jail three times in 
one evening, went to his home, became 
intoxicated and caused a disturbance. 
Twice the sheriff was called and re¬ 
turned him to jail. However, this ap¬ 
parently did not impress upon that 
official the fact that he was neglectful 
of his duties, because the prisoner went 
home a third time, displayed a more 
violent temper, and was finally arrested 
by the local police. He was sentenced to 
pay a fine, but had no money; and the 
police refused to turn him over to the 
sheriff until the fine was paid. The sher¬ 
iff very reluctantly paid the fine. 

Escapes, under such circumstances, 
are so simple that they would be ridicu¬ 
lous if they weren’t tragic. 

A newsclipping from a paper in a 
middle-sized town recently reported 
that a bank robber “sang his way out of 
the local jail.” It was stated that he took 
his place among the visiting religious 
group that had been singing hymns to 
the prisoners, and walked to freedom 
directly past the jailer. Another escape 
item read: “While a trusty was guarding 
the cells, a prisoner held in the county 
jail walked nonchalantly up to the 
door. ‘I’ll go now,’ he calmly an¬ 
nounced. The obliging trusty opened 
the door and the prisoner walked out.” 

In one case five prisoners escaped 
from a well constructed, fairly modern 
jail under circumstances strikingly ex¬ 
emplifying the gross negligence of jail 


officials. For four days the prisoners 
had worked without detection remov¬ 
ing rivets and hammering noisily on 
steel before they effected their escape. 
About 4:25 in the afternoon of the day 
they left, they invited a sixth prisoner 
to accompany them. When he refused, 
they bound and gagged him and placed 
him in an unused cell. 

At 8:30 that evening a turnkey 
brought in a new prisoner and placed 
him in the cell block, but apparently 
made no observations whatever. Twenty 
minutes later the five prisoners—in¬ 
cluding the one admitted by the turn¬ 
key only twenty minutes earlier— 
made their escape. At approximately 
9:25 a turnkey went to the cell block 
and locked the cells for the night with¬ 
out taking a count of the prisoners or 
learning that any had escaped. Some¬ 
time later the prisoner who had been 
tied up managed to free his feet suffi¬ 
ciently to kick a garbage can around 
until he attracted the jailer’s attention. 

One does not need to be a penologist 
or a sociologist or a psychiatrist to 
know that prisoners emerging from 
such loosely administered institutions 
as I have described must inevitably re¬ 
gard the forces of law and order with 
derision, and look upon the possibility 
of being returned to some such haven 
as the result of committing another 
crime without the slightest feeling of 
apprehension. 

But there is another type of jail, all 
too common in our supposedly progres¬ 
sive land, which arouses in the breasts 
of its inmates quite different emotions, 
which are, perhaps, even more condu¬ 
cive to a continued career of crime. 

None of us likes to read about horrors 


- 19 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


—at least, when they are real horrors, 
for which unconsciously we may be 
somewhat to blame—so I will be brief; 
but the reports of our investigators on 
the sanitary and moral conditions in 
large numbers of our local jails reveal a 
state of things which could scarcely have 
been tolerated in the dungeons of the 
Dark Ages. 

No attempt is made in these offend¬ 
ing institutions to separate male crim¬ 
inals from female criminals, adult 
criminals from youthful ones, or even 
to segregate prisoners with contagious 
diseases. Immorality of the grossest 
sort rages unchecked. Cells are vermin- 
infested. Fire hazards are ignored. 

It might be assumed that local boards 
of health would be responsible for 
checking the cleanliness and sanitation 
of these local institutions; but our in¬ 
vestigation showed that 2,204 out °f 
about 3,000 county jails were never 
visited or inspected by local boards of 
health or other sanitary organizations. 
The following is quoted from an in¬ 
spector’s report: 

“The sewage system has been out of 
commission for some time. The septic 
tank overflows not far from the jail kit¬ 
chen, causing bad odors and great 
menace to health; also, causing most of 
the sanitary facilities to be stopped up. 
Since the windows have neither heavy 
screens nor fly screens, great swarms of 
flies today were seen all over the food 
which the prisoners were eating, and 
they had direct access to this awful 
cesspool.” 

In fairness to the group of officials 
directly in charge of these institutions, 
it should be stated that there are some 


who are willing and anxious to main¬ 
tain proper standards, but are unable to 
do so because of lack of funds or lack 
of cooperation on the part of other 
local officials having a joint responsi¬ 
bility. 

Whatever the cause, however, the re¬ 
sulting condition is an intolerable one, 
not just from a sentimental or emo¬ 
tional standpoint, but from the practical 
and responsible standpoint of those 
charged with the prevention of crime. 

Perhaps these conditions, both the 
too lax and the too oppressive ones, are 
no worse than those which existed in 
the decade following the Revolutionary 
War, when—even in Philadelphia— 
the warden of the Walnut Street jail 
permitted religious services for his 
charges only if the preacher was ac¬ 
companied in the pulpit by a gunner 
with a lighted taper standing beside 
a loaded cannon pointed menacingly at 
the worshipping congregation. But, so 
far as making anything out of the resi¬ 
dents of our jails except enemies of so¬ 
ciety, the 20th Century seems to have 
made pitifully few gains over the 18th 
Century. 

The root of most of our difficulties 
with the county jail dates back to the 
early days when these conditions ex¬ 
isted. The fee system which prevailed 
generally in America during the colo¬ 
nial days and the Revolutionary Period 
still survives in a large number of our 
present-day counties and is responsible 
for many of the evils surrounding the 
county jail. Local sheriffs receive a fee 
for the support of prisoners committed 
to their care and are permitted to put 
in their own pockets any amount they 
can save. Here naturally is a strong 


- 20 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


temptation to run the jail in a sloppy 
manner in order to make a profit for 
the sheriff. 

In many counties the sheriff is the 
most highly paid person in his com¬ 
munity. Records indicate, for example, 
that one sheriff whose salary was sup¬ 
posed to be $1,200 a year actually re¬ 
ported an income of about $14,000 a 
year while he was in office. A number of 
county sheriffs have an annual income 
of $25,000 and upwards. Part of this 
income is derived from what the sheriff 
can save on the convicts’ rations. The 
fee system is being gradually abolished, 
but it is still characteristic of far too 
many local political subdivisions. Until 
it is abandoned completely, it is almost 
hopeless to look for any large improve¬ 
ment in the county jail system. 

Over 600,000 persons are committed 
to these county jails every year under 
sentences ranging from a few days to 
death. If you add to this stupendous 
total the number of persons committed 
to await trial the prison population 
would probably fall not very far short of 
1,000,000 persons passing through the 
jails in the course of a year. 

A prison population of 1,000,000—a 
large, though not too shining mark for 
any crime prevention program to aim 
at! 

Here, in one vast audience sit the 
men and women who commit the bulk 
of our serious crimes. Here are the des¬ 
perate criminals who must be prevented 
from escaping to ply their dastardly 
trade. Here are the beginners, the tyros 
in crime, the men and women and boys 
and girls, who have made one mistake 
or who are awaiting trial for offenses 


which they later prove they did not 
commit, who may still be diverted from 
a career of crime. 

Here is a great sector of the standing 
army of crime—generals, regulars, vol¬ 
unteers, conscripts, recruits—where we 
can discipline them, work with them, 
perhaps rehabilitate them. If the latter 
eventuality is not possible—and unfor¬ 
tunately in the case of many hardened 
criminals, it is not—we can at least 
send them out at the end of their terms 
with a wholesome respect for the prin¬ 
ciples of law and order and a whole¬ 
some fear of offending further against 
those principles. 

Failure to achieve these objectives, at 
least in part, means the failure of any 
crime prevention program. We decided 
that it should not be permitted to mean 
the end of ours. 

So the Department of Justice went to 
work on this problem just as vigorously 
as it had on the problem of detection 
and arrest. 

First of all, it held the keepers of its 
Federal prisons to the highest standard 
of efficiency: the idea being not only 
to effect a high-grade penal system for 
its own sake, but to serve as an example 
—just as the Federal Bureau of Investi¬ 
gation has served as an example to all 
law enforcement agencies—to all jails 
and prisons of every kind and class. 

This aim was assisted in no small de¬ 
gree by the Department’s development 
of Alcatraz—known throughout the 
underworld as “The Rock”—where re¬ 
calcitrant prisoners, who might invite 
attempts at rescue from without in 
more accessible locations, could be safe¬ 
ly held under strict discipline through- 


- 21 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


out the entire term of their incarcera¬ 
tion. 

The majority of the inmates of our 
Federal prisons are comparatively well 
behaved; but a few desperate criminals 
among them present a menace to any 
penal institution. Relatives, friends and 
fellow members of the gang congregate 
near the prison to be of help when a 
favorable opportunity is offered. This 
condition invariably exists where large 
penitentiaries are located. 

For some time I had desired to ob¬ 
tain a place of confinement to which 
these more dangerous and intractable 
criminals could be sent. Such a place 
should be apart from the large centers 
of population, preferably on an island 
which would not be easy of access. It 
was not my purpose to find a prison in 
which the inmates would be subjected 
to any unusual or unreasonable environ¬ 
ment, but rather a place which would 
be apart and inaccessible, so that the 
holding of the inmates would be assured 
and their influence removed from the 
better class of prisoners. 

By negotiation with the War Depart¬ 
ment we obtained the use of their pre¬ 
cipitous island in San Francisco Bay, 
more than a mile from shore, where the 
current is swift and escapes are prac¬ 
tically impossible. Alcatraz Prison has 
secure cells for six hundred persons. It 
is in excellent condition and admirably 
fitted for the purposes I had in mind. 
Incidentally—and perhaps not so in¬ 
cidentally, either—fear of being sent to 
“The Rock” has not only promoted 
better behavior within the walls of other 
Federal penitentiaries, but is known 
to have had a wholesome deterrent ef¬ 


fect on criminals without the gates. 

The over-crowded condition of our 
Federal Penitentiaries, which necessi¬ 
tates housing less dangerous prisoners 
and those arrested persons who are 
being held for trial in local jails, has 
turned out to be blessing in disguise, so 
far as setting an example was concerned 
—and enforcing it. 

The Federal government has no right 
to dictate to the local officials how the 
county jails should be operated. It 
should be remembered, however, that 
the Federal government has to use 
county jails for many of its prisoners. 
It is therefore within its province to re¬ 
fuse to use jails which do not meet its 
standard, and to transfer its own Fed¬ 
eral prisoners whenever local officials 
show an unwillingness to cooperate in 
remedying conditions which have been 
called to their attention by the Bureau 
of Prisons. 

This was our opportunity. Local au¬ 
thorities were desperately in need of the 
income derived from boarding these 
Federal charges. In many instances that 
income meant the realization of long 
cherished ideals for better prison condi¬ 
tions. In all instances, it meant addi¬ 
tional money in the local treasury. 

Before a local penal institution could 
qualify for a Government contract, in¬ 
volving a remunerative payment for the 
care of each Federal prisoner, it was 
obliged to satisfy the Department of 
Justice as to its physical equipment, its 
moral standards, its break-proof quali¬ 
ties and its all-round efficiency of man¬ 
agement. To stimulate still further the 
efforts of local authorities, to whom the 
income from the Government was of 
importance, the Department arranged 


- 22 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


a comparative merit system for the jails 
that passed the official test, and paid a 
sliding scale dependent on its degree of 
excellence. 

A rigid jail inspection system has 
been established, and frequent thorough 
inspections are being made. Officials 
immediately in charge of the jails are 
furnished with practical suggestions for 
improvement. Higher local officials are 
notified of existing conditions. United 
States marshals and judges are likewise 
informed, and a list given them of jails 
approved by the Bureau. The coopera¬ 
tion of state agencies and organizations 
has also been solicited and a system for 
the exchange of reports devised. 

Every effort is made to select the best 
jails in each district. Whenever possible, 
female prisoners are concentrated in jails 
where matrons are employed. When 
conditions warrant it, jails are con¬ 
demned and Federal prisoners removed. 
When actual improvements have been 
made in jails that have been condemned 
and conditions have been brought up 
to the required standard, the jails are 
reinstated. 

As a result of the conditions which 
our inspectors reported, 1,600 county 
jails out of a total of 3,000 were con¬ 
demned as unsuitable for Federal pris¬ 
oners; and 748 others may be used only 
in an emergency. That means that al¬ 
most fifty per cent of our local jails 
do not meet minimum standards, and 
25% more are tolerated only because 
no other place can be found. 

These are not comforting figures. 
They show conclusively the need of a 
wholesale clean-up of jail conditions. 

The ancient county jail system which 
was inherited from England three hun¬ 


dred years ago is an anachronism in our 
social order. In this airplane age we do 
not need this survival of the ox-cart 
days. We can now consolidate the small 
local county jails into area or regional 
institutions administered by expertly 
trained officers and, at no additional 
cost to the taxpayers, provide sentenced 
prisoners with reasonably decent care 
and tieatment. If larger regional insti 
tutions of this kind are established, we 
can get rid of the indiscriminate mixing 
of the young with the old, of the first 
offender with the hardened, and of the 
healthy with the diseased. We can then 
provide them with a modicum of em¬ 
ployment, reasonably decent medical 
and hospital treatment, and classify 
them according to the character and 
nature of the crimes they have com¬ 
mitted. In the long run the savings 
under such a system would be mani¬ 
fested not only in an actual decrease in 
the money cost of maintaining prisoners 
but in the larger and more important 
saving of the human suffering caused 
by crime. 

It is too early, of course, to pass final 
judgment as to the results of the De¬ 
partment’s prison program in decreas¬ 
ing the prevalence of crime; but the De¬ 
partment is pleased to record one im¬ 
portant and immediate change for the 
better: the number of Federal prisoners 
escaping from these carefully investi¬ 
gated county jails is now less than one- 
fifth of one per cent. 

A well regulated parole system where¬ 
by deserving prisoners may be permit¬ 
ted to leave their cells before the expira¬ 
tion of their terms, and get permament 
work outside the jail under the super- 


- 23 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


vision of honest parole officers, has its 
proper place in any program of crime 
prevention. In fact, it should be a pow¬ 
erful instrument to the success of that 
program, since it is founded on the 
theory that, wherever rehabilitation is 
possible, it is better to release a deserv¬ 
ing prisoner under strict supervision 
and permit him to prove his worth in 
the world he must ultimately face, than 
it is to force him to languish in prison, 
and then turn him out at the end of his 
term totally unprepared to carry out 
his good resolutions and without the 
guiding influence of any supervision. 

It must be borne in mind that parole 
is not a means of shortening the sen¬ 
tence of a prisoner or any easy way out. 
A system of parole, which is really 
properly organized and administered, 
is looked upon by the prisoners as a bur¬ 
den and not a boon. I recently looked 
over the case of a prisoner who had de¬ 
clined parole because he said he was un¬ 
willing “to gamble one year for four 
years.” By that, he meant that he’d 
rather stay in the penitentiary a year 
more than to be released under a parole 
system which would place him under 
supervision for an aggregate period of 
four years. He wanted to leave prison 
“scott free” with no strings tied to him 
so that he could do as he liked when he 
left the penitentiary rather than be 
under the constant supervision of a Fed¬ 
eral Parole Officer. 

The Department of Justice rejects the 
idea that parole should be used for 
clemency, as an opportunity to review 
the sentence meted out by the trial jus¬ 
tice, or for any purpose except to pro¬ 
vide a scientific and helpful means of re¬ 


habilitating those cases where experts 
agree that reformation' is possible. Its 
whole justification lies in the fact that 
it affords the state an opportunity to 
judge a prisoner’s fitness for freedom 
under actual living conditions and while 
it still has the legal right to hold him. 
Wherever parole systems do not do this, 
then they cannot rightfully be called 
parole. Release without supervision is 
not parole. If parole is used by the venal 
or the unprincipled for shortening the 
sentence of a prisoner, it certainly 
ought to be condemned. 

One of the fundamental difficulties 
of many parole systems springs from the 
fact that state legislators, when harassed 
by demands to reduce prison and crime 
costs, enact a parole law but do not 
provide the necessary funds for its ad¬ 
ministration. In many states the prisoner 
is released under a parole system which 
has no funds or means to employ the 
skilled personnel needed to assist the 
prisoner in readjusting himself again 
in the community, supervise his con¬ 
duct, or see that he does not lapse again 
into criminal ways. It costs an average 
of about $300 a year to maintain a man 
in prison, and it seems only reasonable 
to ask the state to expend an average of 
about $50 a year to supervise him when 
the walls of the prison are figuratively 
extended to include the community in 
which the man, who is still a prisoner, 
takes up his residence. But with one or 
two exceptions no state is expending as 
much as this in the administration of 
its parole system, and most of them 
spend practically nothing for parole 
service in the community. 

Incidentally, of course, parole boards 
are human and their judgment is not 


- 24 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


infallible. Our knowledge of psychology 
and the vast number of hereditary and 
environmental factors which affect hu¬ 
man conduct is still so meager that we 
must not expect perfect success when 
selecting men to be given another trial 
in the community. There is no reason 
to believe, however, that men on parole 
boards, if they have the proper facilities 
at their command, will be mistaken in 
their judgments any more frequently 
than are other men who wear judicial 
robes but who are chosen in the same 
manner and presumably have the same 
qualifications as those who sit on parole 
boards. On the contrary, it is reasonable 
to believe that the judge’s opinion may 
be so colored by the emotion and the oft- 
times hysterical atmosphere surround¬ 
ing a case that he will hand down a sen¬ 
tence which fits neither the criminal nor 
the crime he has committed. 

We know from two hundred years of 
experience that long sentences cannot 
cure crimes. If that were so, all we 
would need to do would be to construct 
more prisons, build higher walls, and 
mete out longer sentences. Moreover, if 
any such simple solution were possible, 
the crime problem would have been 
cured long ago. Certainly also, no one 
has been able to suggest a substitute for 
the parole system or evolve a plan which 
precludes the possibility that prisoners 
will again resort to their former crim¬ 
inal ways. Remember, in this connec¬ 
tion that every other man who now 
enters prison has been in prison on at 
least one former occasion. A small per¬ 
centage of these have had the benefits 
of parole. 

I do not mean to say that much can¬ 
not be done to improve the parole sys¬ 


tem. Since crime is now a nation-wide 
problem and it can be controlled only 
when all of the states work together, 
the Department of Justice is trying to 
foster a middle-of-the-road program re¬ 
lating to parole. We allow for parole 
but seek to improve its administration. 

Here then, as in the case of the jails 
we have a great opportunity and a great 
problem. Parole can become an effective 
weapon in the fight to prevent crime, 
or it can be, as it too often is now, a 
bludgeoning blow to those whose duty 
it is to enforce the law, and a continuing 
menace to the safety and happiness of 
the law-abiding citizen. And again, as 
in the case of the jails, the Department 
of Justice has no authority over the 
parole systems of the various states and 
no right to tell parole boards how they 
should conduct their vitally important 
business. 

What the Department can do—and 
is now doing, is to conduct a thorough¬ 
going survey of the methods of releasing 
prisoners in the various states, and to 
give the widest possible publicity to the 
findings of this survey. On July first the 
collection of statistics which had pro¬ 
gressed for 18 months came to an end. 
Within the next year I hope to have 
published a study which will for the 
first time describe the parole practices 
of the 48 states. 

We must remember that the problem 
of crime control falls into two broad 
fields—one repressive and punitive in 
nature and the other preventive and 
reformative. Neither can be neglected, 
and the Department of Justice strives to 
give equal consideration to each field 
even though the methods of approach 


- 25 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


sometimes seems to be in sharp conflict. 

Our jails and prisons must be con¬ 
sidered as places where men go as pun¬ 
ishment and not for punishment. Presi¬ 
dent Roosevelt, who has given a great 
deal of thought and attention to the 
crime problem and has always been a 
constant supporter of our efforts to curb 
crime, once said in commenting on a 
biography of Thomas Mott Osborne 
that he liked to think of Mr. Osborne 
“as a real pioneer who brought out the 
fact that ninety men out of every one 
hundred who go to prison return sooner 
or later to our midst as members of our 
communities. His (Osborne’s) deep 
principle was wholly sound—that hu¬ 
man beings who are apprehended and 
punished by the state for sins against 
society can, in a very large percentage 


of cases, be restored to society as law- 
abiding citizens. It is in the prison itself 
where the greatest opportunity lies in 
turning men who have sinned into men 
who will sin no more.” 

The improvements in the detection 
and apprehension of criminals instituted 
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation 
and adopted by cooperative local law- 
enforcement agencies have received the 
stamp of enthusiastic public approval. 
The less spectacular but none the less 
important work being done by the Bu¬ 
reau of Prisons in raising standards in 
jails and prisons will, as people become 
educated in crime control, receive en¬ 
thusiastic commendation. In the next 
chapter, I will discuss some practical 
steps which can be taken to prevent 
crimes before the jail stage is reached. 


- 26 - 


(Children 



IV 


W.™ the collapse of the juvenile 
court as a crime prevention cure-all, 
there was a great scurrying about 
among welfare workers and delinquen¬ 
cy experts to find a satisfying substitute. 

The church, which, a generation or 
two ago, would have been a first refuge 
in such an emergency, was out of the 
question. A study of more than fourteen 
thousand cases of juvenile delinquency 
had already shown that less than a 
third were connected direcdy or indi¬ 
rectly with any church or religious 
group. 

The great character-building organi¬ 
zations associated with the church, such 
as the various Y’s, although admittedly 
reaching an enormous group of young 
men and women in their late nineteens 
and early twenties, made few contacts 
with the youngsters crime prevention- 
ists were trying to reach. Less than fif¬ 
teen per cent of the fourteen thousand 
typical cases were connected with these 
associations. 

How, then, to reach the other eighty- 
five per cent? 

The Boys’ Club and the Girls’ Club, 
the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, 


were obvious possibilities as new cure- 
alls. But aside from the inescapable fact 
that no one of the four organizations, 
for reasons of sex or scope, could cover 
the whole field, as the juvenile court 
was supposed to have done, there was 
reason to doubt if all four could be ex¬ 
pected to do so. 

Here and there, a Boys’ or Girls’ Club, 
situated in a deteriorated area—as, for 
instance, the All Nations Boys’ Club in 
Los Angeles—measured up to the spe¬ 
cific requirements of crime preventive 
effort. The average Boys’ Club, on the 
other hand, dealt with a stratum of 
youthful society a cut above the thickest 
layer of delinquency. 

The Scouts seemed even less available 
as a central agency for reaching juvenile 
crime in the congested areas. Mr. Walter 
Cade Reckless, in his volume “Juvenile 
Delinquency,” gives cogent reasons why 
this is so: 

“It is clear that the Scout program 
reaches boys primarily between twelve 
and fourteen years. Since the roots of 
delinquency usually go back earlier in 
childhood, one can hardly say that the 
Scouts are reaching boys early enough 


- 27 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


to offset the factors making for malad¬ 
justment and misconduct. Even if the 
Scout progress were pushed down in 
years.... the Scouts attract the already 
moralized, well-organized boys and 
their local troops tend to be distributed 
in the non-delinquent areas of the city 
—areas where delinquency rates are 
low, public and Sunday School records 
are high." 

Gradually it dawned on the crime 
prevention world that there wasn’t any 
cure-all for the juvenile situation. 

Following the abandonment of the 
cure-all scheme, attention centered on 
finding some one basic principle of ap¬ 
proach to the problem on which all 
could agree and to which all could con¬ 
form. There were those who felt that 
economic stress was the underlying 
cause of all delinquency. There were 
others who felt that organized effort 
should be concentrated on the indi¬ 
vidual child’s emotional reaction to his 
surroundings. A third group favored ex¬ 
clusive attention to playgrounds and 
other recreational facilities. 

From this babel of opinions emerged 
the now largely accepted truth, there 
is no one principle, any more than there 
is any one type of organization, appli¬ 
cable to all delinquents and all delin¬ 
quent areas. 

This conclusion, although discourag¬ 
ing enough so far as a prompt solution 
of the problem was concerned, built for 
ultimate victory by bringing under the 
microscope for scientific study and ap¬ 
praisal all of the worth while efforts, 
which had been made by different types 
of agencies working on different sets of 
principles suggested by the different 


problems of the communities in which 
they operated. 

First, there were those old standbys, 
the Children’s Village, which had oper¬ 
ated for eighty years at Dobbs Ferry on 
the Hudson, and the George Junior Re¬ 
public, where, for nearly fifty years, 
good citizenship was taught to bad boys. 
The former institution, famous for its 
vocational training, and the latter, for 
its successful experiment in self govern¬ 
ment, both exemplify the sound prin¬ 
ciple of “learning through doing.’’ 

This type of organization does an in¬ 
valuable work with certain types of 
boys; its guiding principles might well 
be extended to the activities of other 
agencies dealing with delinquents; its 
operation, however, requires an outlay 
which, at the moment, is quite beyond 
the resources of the average community. 

Less expensive organizations of sim¬ 
ilar character have done excellent work 
in some localities. The Summer Camp 
for Delinquent Boys at Lake Green¬ 
wood in Franklin County, Ohio, has co¬ 
operated with an exceptionally able 
Domestic Relations Court in Columbus 
to achieve exceedingly satisfactory re¬ 
sults. Longview Farm, at Acton, Massa¬ 
chusetts, sometimes called “a profes¬ 
sional foster home,’’ has been notably 
successful in the supposedly impossible 
task of creating home atmosphere on 
an institutional scale. 

Plans, which use the school as a focal 
point, vary from the individual efforts 
of progressive teachers in ordinary pub¬ 
lic schools to elaborate institutions spe¬ 
cially maintained for the education of 
the problem child. 

Typical of the first group are the East 
Harlem and Public School 181 plans, 


- 28 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


both due in large measure to the in¬ 
spiring influence of one teacher, the 
late Nathan Peyser, who died only last 
year while still principal of Public 
School 181 in Brooklyn. 

Recognizing that the school is but one 
of many agencies operating in the life 
of the child, Mr. Peyser felt that the 
school was “ideal instrumentality” with 
which to unite and motivate the forces 
of “churches, settlements, missions, 
nurseries, libraries, clinics, charity or¬ 
ganizations and other welfare units.” 

The special-school group is typified 
by the famous Binet Schools of Newark, 
New Jersey, which have been operating 
with marked success for twenty-five 
years, and the Montefiore Special School 
for Problem Boys, established in 1929 
by the Chicago Board of Education. 
Both are frankly experimental. 

In between are the Bureau of Special 
Service in the Public schools of Jersey 
City, which might be described as a 
city-wide elaboration of the Peyser idea. 
Through this service all cases of juven¬ 
ile delinquency which the police detect 
are referred first to the Bureau instead 
of to the Court, and many children are 
thus spared appearance in court. It fur¬ 
nishes one of the best examples of close 
cooperation between the police and the 
school. Mention should also be made of 
the work with maladjusted children 
in the public schools of Detroit, which 
includes not only special behavior 
schools like the Binet and the Monte¬ 
fiore but a well organized plan for im¬ 
pregnating the school system with scien¬ 
tific treatment of special student needs. 

The least pretentious and perhaps the 
most practical contribution that the 
schools have yet made to the crime pre¬ 


vention cause is the visiting teacher, 
whose duty is to visit the schoolroom 
and consult with the regular teacher 
about her problem children, and then 
visit the homes of those children and 
consult with the parents in an effort to 
bring school and home together in in¬ 
telligent, effective effort. It may be ac¬ 
cepted almost as an axiom that the visit¬ 
ing teacher is a necessary adjunct to any 
successful campaign against juvenile 
delinquency. 

A more formal approach to the home 
is that of the Parent School of the 
Domestic Relations Court of Columbus, 
Ohio, which undertakes, in night school 
groups of not more than fifteen, to edu¬ 
cate fathers and mothers in better meth¬ 
ods of care and discipline for their 
children. This work is being watched 
with special interest, because it is known 
to be a sad fact that “many parents 
must turn to the mirror to find the true 
reason why their boy or girl has been 
engulfed in crime.” 

An activity in which the private citi¬ 
zen, under the guidance of trained so¬ 
cial workers, has done memorable ser¬ 
vice is the Big Brother and Big Sister 
Movement, which started in 1904 when 
Colonel Ernest Coulter, addressing a 
men’s meeting at the Central Presby¬ 
terian Church in New York, said: “Be 
a big brother to the boy.” The sole limit 
to the effectiveness of these splendid 
organizations seems to be the limit on 
the number of public-spirited and so¬ 
cial-minded men and women, who can 
be persuaded to spare time for painstak¬ 
ing work with the individual child. 

Until 1925 the local law enforcement 
bodies, outside of the probation officers 


- 29 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


attached to juvenile courts, had taken 
no official part in crime prevention 
work. In that year, however, August 
Vollmer, Chief of Police of Berkeley, 
California—a remarkable individual 
who combined in his daily program the 
duties of a policeman and those of pro¬ 
fessor at the University of California— 
established in his department a Crime 
Prevention Division, which has served 
as a model for New York City and 
many other progressive municipalities. 
A high point in police cooperation fol¬ 
lowed in the establishing by supposedly 
hardboiled policemen of boys’ Clubs, 
of which the Boys’ Club of the Metro¬ 
politan Police of Washington, D. C., 
is an excellent example. 

August vollmer’s most notable contri¬ 
bution, however, to the cause of crime 
prevention had occurred ten years be¬ 
fore, in 1915, when he founded in co¬ 
operation with the Superintendent of 
schools and other public-spirited citi¬ 
zens, the country’s first Coordinating 
Council. Vollmer’s theory, later enun¬ 
ciated by many delinquency experts, 
was that the facilities needed to grapple 
with the child problem already existed. 
What they needed was to be integrated, 
coordinated and guided. The plan was 
immediately successful, not only in 
Berkeley, but in other parts of Cali¬ 
fornia. The Council in Los Angeles— 
or rather group of Councils—is gen¬ 
erally considered a model specimen of 
effective crime prevention work. Cali¬ 
fornia’s example is now being followed 
in many parts of the nation. 

The original Councils did a good deal 
of direct work with delinquents and 
their parents. The later ones confined 


themselves chiefly to research, coordina¬ 
tion and guidance. In Michigan, where 
the plan is being worked out on a 
statewide basis, the policy of working 
exclusively through existing organiza¬ 
tions is especially emphasized. It seems 
probable that by so doing the Coordi¬ 
nating Council is likely to achieve its 
greatest usefulness. 

The success of the coordinating coun¬ 
cils in arraying so many local organiza¬ 
tions in an efficient campaign against 
the common enemy, delinquency, has 
naturally centered the constructive 
thought of crime prevention workers on 
the coordinating principle and possible 
means of applying it on a state-wide or 
nation-wide scale. 

Kenyon J. Scudder, guiding spirit of 
the Los Angeles council, has recom¬ 
mended that the councils themselves 
receive “adequate supervision from a 
recognized national agency.” Frederic 
M. Thrasher and Sheldon and Eleanor 
Glueck, outstanding authorities in the 
crime prevention field, have endorsed 
the principle of a central guiding, co¬ 
ordinating and information-distributing 
bureau. 

The Boston Herald , in reviewing the 
Gluecks’ epochal volume, “One Thou¬ 
sand Juvenile Delinquents,” said: “The 
report indicates a general situation 
which points to the indispensability of 
some effective integrating organ which 
would be charged with central guid¬ 
ance, if not definite oversight of the 
entire treatment of delinquents.” 

Even more definite were the recom¬ 
mendations of the Conference on Crime, 
a conclave of more than six hundred 
crime experts from all over the country, 


- 30 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


whom I invited to Washington in De¬ 
cember 1934 to consider this and other 
problems. By unanimous vote, the Con¬ 
ference urged “State and National lead¬ 
ership through appropriate govern¬ 
mental and voluntary organizations, in 
fostering the development of these co¬ 
ordinating agencies, the provision of 
constructive educational, vocational and 
recreational opportunities for youth, and 
the provision of competent, skilled ser¬ 
vice to children in need of guidance and 
correction.” 

I could multiply these instances of ex¬ 
pert and popular approval, but it is 
enough to say that there seems to be a 
definite demand from crime prevention 
workers and the public generally for a 
clearing house for mutual advantage, 
similar to the clearing house which has 
been established by the Bureau of Inves¬ 
tigation of the Department of Justice 
by classification of nearly six million 
finger prints for use by the various de¬ 
partments of the country. 

There are plenty of precedents for 
such action. The National Bar Program 
of the American Bar Association is one. 
The work of the American Law Insti¬ 
tute in the preparation of the Code of 
Criminal Procedure and a Code of 
Criminal Law and Administration is 
another. The National Probation Asso¬ 
ciation, the International Association 
of Chiefs of Police and the American 
Prison Association are still other ex¬ 
amples of nation-wide action on matters 
associated with the work of local law 
enforcement. 

Suggestions were at first made that 
the Childrens Bureau of the Depart¬ 
ment of Labor or the office of the Com¬ 
missioner of Education in the Depart¬ 


ment of the Interior might undertake 
the coordinating of these various agen¬ 
cies into a strong national campaign for 
crime prevention. More insistently, per¬ 
haps, and in increasing volume, have 
come requests that the Department of 
Justice should add a fourth unit to con¬ 
centrate on this fourth problem of wip¬ 
ing out delinquency at its source. This 
unit would supplement the functions 
performed by the three units now en¬ 
gaged in apprehension, prosecution and 
punishment. The appeals for assistance 
have come from all parts of the country, 
from private citizens and high officials, 
from Governors, Attorneys General, 
prosecutors, parole boards, civic leaders 
and women’s organizations. And our 
desperate efforts to respond helpfully 
have been pitiful. We have had no staff 
for this purpose, and no funds with 
which to even make more than a bare 
acknowledgment to these cries for help. 
I have determined that we shall no 
longer remain an impotent agency in 
this most vital work. 

Recognizing this growing demand 
and realizing that with only a moderate 
extension of activities, the Department 
of Justice can be made a nerve center 
of helpful impulses and a clearing house 
of useful information, I appointed an 
Advisory Committee to aid me in the 
consideration of this matter. This Com¬ 
mittee labored well and long, and unan¬ 
imously recommended the creation of 
the proposed scientific and educational 
center within the structure of the De¬ 
partment of Justice. 

Therefore, I decided to submit to the 
Congress a request for authority to cre¬ 
ate in the Department of Justice a Bu- 


- 31 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


reau to be known as the Federal Bureau 
of Crime Prevention. In this new Bu¬ 
reau, it was proposed to concentrate all 
of the functions connected with the 
Department’s proposed scientific and 
educational crime center not allocated 
to the Bureau of Investigation, the 
Criminal Division and the Bureau of 
Prisons. These four units, working in 
harmonious cooperation and under the 
direct supervision of the Attorney Gen¬ 
eral, seemed well adapted for the work¬ 
ing out of the desired objectives. 

To my amazement, however, the Con¬ 
gress, which had proved so cooperative 
in strengthening our hand in the detec¬ 
tion and prosecution of crime, proved 
apathetic to all pleas for aid in the pre¬ 
vention of it. 

If economy had been the only reason 
for the Congress’s declining to accept 
the Department’s recommendations, it 
might have been possible to overcome 
its objections by showing that, in the 
long run, almost any effective move to 
prevent crime is economy of the wisest 
sort. 

Opposition was voiced on the ground 
of expense, when the President’s pro¬ 
posal for a CCC was first made, but 
when the public realized what this hu¬ 
manitarian measure had saved in dol¬ 
lars and cents by diverting into useful 
channels youthful energy which, if left 
to find outlets of its own, might have 
plunged the country into an orgy of 
destructive and costly crimes, even the 
most active critics of the New Deal were 
forced to admit that the CCC was not 
only the wisest, but the cheapest thing 
we could do. 

But in the hearings on this proposed 
bureau I became increasingly convinced 


that the real difficulty arose from the 
fact that the general public, as repre¬ 
sented by their public servants in Wash¬ 
ington, had not yet grasped the need or 
the meaning of what we were trying to 
do. It was bewilderment, I think, more 
than considered opposition, that made 
one committee member—and a usually 
understanding one—say to me: 

“We don’t want you running around 
the country telling people to be good.” 

That, of course, was the last thing 
that we wanted to do, either; and it was 
certainly the last thing that we intended 
to do. But in retrospect, it is easy to see 
how the confusion arose. 

We Americans are much given to 
quick generalizations. We have a weak¬ 
ness for headlines. In a certain fashion 
we realize that we are apt to be misled 
by them, but that does not seem to 
shake our faith in them. We generalize 
our hopes, fears, vices, virtues, plans 
and ideals—give them a name and then 
think more of the name than of the sub¬ 
stance. We talk of “economic law” “in¬ 
herent rights,” “fundamental liberty,” 
“equality of opportunity,” and “social 
justice” until these concepts register 
more as abstractions than as realities. 
For this reason we are apt to be bewil¬ 
dered when some movement like crime 
prevention comes along and seeks to 
treat ideas and principles as living and 
vital things. 

Obviously, our job was to acquaint 
the public with the facts. That is what 
my associates and I — in public ad¬ 
dresses, in radio broadcasts and in inter¬ 
views with the press—have been trying 
to do. We are already seeing results. Re¬ 
quests for information are regularly sup- 


- 32 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


plemented by demands for action. I feel 
sure that an enlightened public opinion 
will stand firmly behind us when next 
we seek congressional support for this 
worthiest of causes, and that it will 
make itself felt where it will do the 
most good. 

So convinced am I that the crime pre¬ 
vention program must succeed, and that 
it cannot succeed without some such 
nerve center as I have proposed, that I 
have gone right ahead, with the enthu¬ 
siastic cooperation of the Advisory Com¬ 
mittee on Crime, to lay down the prin¬ 
ciples on which I believe the Bureau of 
Crime Prevention will ultimately be 
founded, and to establish within limits 
the various functions it will ultimately 
discharge. 

First of all, it will be a coordinating 
organization rather than an executive 
one. Local coordinating councils have 
done their best work, not by adding 
still another agency to the many already 
engaged in some forms of crime pre¬ 
vention, but by working with and 
through existing agencies to increase 
efficiency and eliminate waste. The Bu¬ 
reau of Crime Prevention of the Depart¬ 
ment of Justice will follow this proved 
policy. 

In no case will it usurp the functions 
of state or local officials charged with 
the enforcement of law and the preven¬ 
tion of crime, but will work with those 
officials through exchange of experi¬ 
ences, frequent consultation and friend¬ 
ly suggestion to the end that they may 
be better able to cooperate with the 
home, the church, the school and the 
private character-building organizations 
of their own community in a unified 
and coordinated program. 


It will offer a means of maintaining 
the closest possible contact with private 
organizations interested in crime pre¬ 
vention, and with groups of citizens in 
the various States who need assistance 
and encouragement in reorganizing and 
improving crime prevention agencies in 
their own jurisdictions. 

It will act as a clearing house for in¬ 
formation concerning improved meth¬ 
ods in use in the various states, and 
a means of preserving valuable prece¬ 
dents and techniques established in one 
section of the country, which hitherto 
have been lost to communities in other 
sections. 

It will collaborate in state and local 
crime conferences, and other crime pre¬ 
vention and law enforcement meetings 
in which Federal participation is re¬ 
quested. 

It will cooperate with schools, colleges 
and universities, no one of which at the 
present time, in the whole United States, 
provides an adequate course in which 
an intelligent citizen desiring to prepare 
himself for dealing with this problem, 
can do so. 

It will adopt the proved technique of 
the Department of Agriculture—which 
pays more attention to the needs of 
cattle than some of the rest of us do to 
the needs of human beings!—and send 
out expert advisors to travel from town 
to town and cooperate personally with 
citizens engaged in, or planning to en¬ 
gage in, a crime prevention campaign. 
There will be need also for research of 
the most meticulous sort. 

It will, in general, constitute itself a 
focal group for stirring up interest in 
crime prevention, as the Federal Bureau 


- 33 - 


WE CAN PREVENT CRIME 


of Investigation has stirred up interest 
in crime detection; for stimulating ac¬ 
tivity, public and private, and keeping 
alive activity, once it is aroused; and for 
assisting in every possible way the ef¬ 
forts of state and local organizations 
and groups of public spirited citizens 
engaged in this flank movement on 
crime. 

I hope I do not need to add that it 
will invite at all times suggestions and 
recommendations from the general pub¬ 
lic. The Attorney General’s Conference 
on Crime established that policy as a 
foundation stone of the Department of 
Justice’s campaign against crime. Up to 
that time, the public had always ap¬ 
pealed to the Government for aid in 
dealing with the menace of lawlessness. 
But now the process is reversed—the 
Government appeals to the public for 
its thoughtful advice, for its sustained 
interest, and for its active help in a 
national movement to meet a common 
peril. 

No government official who has an 
intelligent appreciation of his role, de¬ 
sires tb operate in a vacuum. There is 
no monopoly of wisdom or of discretion, 
or of sound judgment residing in those 
who happen, for a time, to be placed in 
positions of power. 

The more our citizens express them¬ 
selves, the more their wishes and views 
are made known, the more insistent 
their demand for sustained and intelli¬ 
gent treatment of the social corrosions 


of crime, the more certain it is that the 
government will adequately respond. 

The fight in which I ask your support 
will not be dramatic or spectacular. It 
will not quickly attain its objective. But 
it must and can be made. 

The summons to enlistment in this 
movement is, then, more than a call to 
arms. It is a call to patience, intelligence, 
consecration and ceaseless labor, con¬ 
tinued over a long period of time, in¬ 
deed, as long as the need exists. But it 
is the kind of fight that has its reward. 

Let me revert again to the phenomena 
of floods and repeat one thought which 
I expressed in an earlier chapter. “There 
is something utterly futile about the last- 
minute task of piling up sand bags, dy¬ 
namiting levees, setting up shelter sta¬ 
tions, performing all the other acts 
which are so often left to the hysteria of 
the moment when the flood reaches its 
crest. There is something terribly tragic 
in any scene in which a helpless hu¬ 
manity struggles with a disaster which 
it could have prevented and which it 
finds too late has struck with death and 
destruction.” 

In the same way, there is something 
terribly depressing about the erection 
of prison walls to confine men who 
might have been saved in the first in¬ 
stance. But there comes a real satisfac¬ 
tion when we turn our hand to a task 
which will restore to the youngsters of 
this country some measure of that life, 
that liberty, and that pursuit of happi¬ 
ness which is their proper heritage. 


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